I am divorced from a big law partner. AMA
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Anonymous
| How are you doing OP? Besides the triggering AMA post, have you healed form your divorce? Are you dating, in a relationship or remarried? What do you do to take care of yourself? |
Anonymous
I did not get any alimony. I did not ask for any. I was hoping to remarry (and I did) and figured alimony would not last very long if I found a new partner. Child support was very generous. My ex-husband was and is a very good person, even though he was a workaholic. He said throughout the divorce process that the most important thing was to keep the children's best interests in mind, to try to minimize the inevitable disruptions to their lives. We both realized that if the kids and I could afford to continue living nearby (instead of me having to move a lot farther out of town to afford a place to live), then it would be much easier for the kids to see him whenever the mood or opportunity arose. So child support was generous enough to allow us to live nearby, and that really did work out great for all. I don't think I need to get into an exact number, but it was a generous percentage of his income. It was above mandated guidelines, since guidelines didn't really cover his salary range. But again, in part this was also because there was no alimony. |
Anonymous
Honestly, I married my ex after he was already partner (he left for a time and then returned to his partnership), so I don't know what that transition is like. But if you have survived this far, and it's working for you, it will probably continue to work for you. One of the things that I came to realize is that my ex had a workaholic personality and worked longer hours than many of his colleagues, because it was his passion. He wanted to do the best possible job and that's what it took. When I occasionally asked him to cut back on his hours, he said he could do that in theory but that he would be very unhappy if he wasn't doing his best work. I didn't want him to be unhappy, so he just kept on prioritizing work over family. When I found out that other people in his firm had a healthier work-life balance, it made me feel even sadder about my home situation. So I can't really give anyone else advice, because I only know how it was in my own home, which was unhappy. |
Anonymous
He was already a partner and had left to do some other very interesting things (two different jobs) for a few years, and we met near the end of his time away from big law. My career was fledgling. I should mention that there's an age difference in the 10-12 year range. We met when I was below 25 and he was above 35. So even leaving aside the big law aspect, we were at different points in our careers. |
Anonymous
Oops, I missed this question. I'm not sure the issue was his practice area; it was the expectations of big law. Here are some examples. Since he was just returning to big law as we were getting married, he was determined to be available for legal "emergencies" even on our honeymoon. So we needed to stay within a couple of hours of DC, and he needed to phone in every day to see how they were managing without him for our one-week semi-local low-key honeymoon. If they had "needed" him, we would have aborted the honeymoon so he could get back to work. In a way I sort of get it, since he was just starting up again and would not want to leave a client in the lurch. But come on, it was our honeymoon! Holidays were similar. He used to say to me, "Clients are paying big money so that their lawyers will be available to them. They don't care if it's a holiday. If they need something, and they need it right away, that has to be the priority, even if it's a holiday." That being said, he never actually missed Thanksgiving or Christmas, but he was often working very hard on the days before and after. And he went back to work a few hours after our firstborn was born, and he went out of the country for a ten-day business trip starting the day after our firstborn came home from the hospital, a few days after birth. When we had a sick child, he never ever took a day off from work. Not even an hour. It had to be me, or we had to hire help from a babysitting agency. I took as much time as I could when a child was sick, but with the kind of job I had, I could not take off indefinitely, so sometimes we did have to hire a stranger, which made me sad. But my ex's attitude was, "It would not be cost-effective" for him to stay home. That was the way he looked at it. Not: "We have a sick child who needs a parent here today," but, "It's more cost effective to hire a stranger so I can keep making money." So no, I did not have realistic expectations about the demands of his practice. I thought that every now and then, family would come first, but it never did. Again, I do not in any way believe that every big law marriage is like this. But this is why I'm divorced now and not every big law marriage crumbles. |
Anonymous
I did work before, during, and after our marriage. But for a few years when each child was birth to about 1 1/2, I took time off. Most of the time I worked part-time. It would have been hard for both of us to be full-time since he was working 70 hours per week as a baseline, and more if things were "busy." We had two kids. Our support agreement did not include college and grad school, but that is because of the cordial nature of our break-up. He said he did not think it should be mandated for him to pay for college, because that is not mandated for any parent, and what if one of our kids ended up being ... oh, I can't remember how he put it, but if by some remote chance one of our children should turn out to be, let's say, a criminal or whatever, he should not be obligated to send that kid to college. We verbally agreed that we would both help put the kids through college in proportion to our incomes, and that is what we did. We wrote our own separation agreement, and we each just got a lawyer to check it over and make sure it was proper in terms of language and enforceability. It was amazing how simple our process was compared to most, because he truly wanted to prioritize doing what was in the best interests of the children. So he agreed to pretty much everything I suggested. The money thing was not an issue. I was worried that custody arrangements might be an issue. But he didn't want to write anything specific into the agreement. From his perspective, it would be best for the kids if their primary residence was with me, and they could visit him whenever they wanted. Without putting it into writing, in his mind, a realistic amount of visitation would be: one weekday evening (for dinner and hanging out / homework, but not to stay overnight); and one weekend day and night each week (either from Friday evening into Saturday before bedtime, or from Saturday morning into Sunday morning); and then some vacation and holiday time. So our agreement just said that we would share legal custody and I would have primary physical custody. Nothing more specific than that. The rest was all just verbal agreement. And the rest of our separation agreement just dealt with distribution of marital assets. From the first day of our separation to our signed agreement was only three weeks, and we each had met with a lawyer for a few hours at most, in total, mostly to rubber-stamp what we had written ourselves. It was easy for me to find a lawyer but I don't recall exactly how I found mine. It wasn't exactly someone random out of the yellow pages, but almost. I don't think anyone recommended my lawyer to me. My lawyer was very efficient. (I do remember that he was quite impressed with my husband's pay.) |
Anonymous
I have been doing great ever since the day I left! I have healed completely from the divorce. It was such a relief finally to leave the marriage. Honestly, I began regretting the marriage within a month of our wedding day and I stuck it out for over a decade, and we tried counseling at various points. It was really hard to leave, because I didn't know if I was miserable enough to justify putting the family through a divorce. I kept hoping to find enough contentment from the other realms of my life. And sometimes life together was very happy... when he was available to us. But when he started having to be out of town a lot, I just got more and more used to being a single parent, and then I felt even more unhappy when he was back home, because he still was not available to us, but I would feel my hopes dashed again every day, along with frustrations that our smoothly running single parent routine was getting disrupted. So I started to realize that we would be fine and I would be fine if we split up. I am happily remarried. My ex eventually remarried but is now divorced again. My kids adjusted just fine after the split. I think we were all happier. It was one of those rare cases where the kids were seemingly not damaged by the divorce but in fact seemed happier and healthier afterwards, along with their parents. So that helped ameliorate my guilt for breaking up the family. Some years later, my kids said to me, "We totally understand why you and Dad split up. And you're both happier now. We just don't understand why you got married in the first place, since you're so different." One of the things I was a bit worried about was if my own kids would turn out to be workaholics like their dad, in their own adult careers. I do think one of them has tendencies in that direction but fortunately married someone who insists on work-life balance. And maybe it helped for them to spend part of their childhoods in a newly formed family (with my second husband) where there was healthy work-life balance and where family was always a priority. |
Anonymous
| Did you recommend a career in big law to your children? |
Anonymous
Ha ha. NO!!! I do not recommend a career in big law to anyone. There are other lawyers in my extended family, and they all have work-life balance, even those that work very very hard. Life is too short. Family comes first in my book. It is impossible for family to come first for someone working 70+ hours per week. Again, this is just my own experience of the cost to the family of a person pursuing a big law career. |
Anonymous
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OP here again. I feel like I need to qualify my last answer a bit even though it will always be true that I do not recommend a career in big law to anyone.
My ex might have had inordinately high expectations for his own career, which led him to be even more of a workaholic than most of his colleagues. He really wanted to be one of the top lawyers in the country, not just at his firm. That is a very high bar! So even though he did distinguish himself, he did not live up to his own expectations. I think it might be possible that the big law firms are populated with extremely bright, talented high achievers who have always been the best at everything they've done, and now they find themselves in a world of similar folks, so they are not the shining star any more, even though they are highly respected and well compensated and are feeling stimulated by the work challenges. So it is possible that some of the same people who choose a big law career would be workaholics at whatever other job they might choose... not of necessity but from passion and commitment to the pursuit of excellence. It's just that in big law, since the whole culture is that way, it feeds on itself and normalizes it, and so it tends to become more and more extreme, and the people in that world, some of them anyhow, don't even realize how far beyond the norm it is. In my own career, I too originally had aspirations to be one of the best of the best. But I also craved balance in my life and I loved family life. So I learned to compromise and reduce my expectations for my own career. I wouldn't be a superstar, but I would be very good, and that would suffice. It is hard to crank down expectations when we've been raised to be the best at something or everything. I came from a family like that, as did my ex. I still wrestle with my unrealized ambitions. Part of me still wants and expects to be a superstar, and I haven't really made my peace with being just an ordinary achiever. It was really different going to dinner parties of big law couples, compared to the dinner parties I went to with my second husband when I was just getting to know his friends and colleagues. I really felt the conversations around me at the big law dinner parties were all about accomplishments. Immediately upon meeting me, everyone was sizing me up based on my career path. They never asked about anything else, not about my family or what I liked to do or what I thought about this or that current event or anything else. Again, this was just my own experience and I hope it's been different for other big law spouses. But I always felt like I was in a weird world of super-achievers who didn't or wouldn't connect with other people except in terms of achievement. At least that's how it was on first meeting. I did get to know some of the couples quite well over time and they were lovely and well-rounded people. But put a bunch of them together in a room and wow, it was not my idea of a fun time. So I'm just wondering if there is a self-selection process at work, sort of a big law in-breeding thing or something. Some people are going to love big law and make it work for them. Most of the others won't last. And some, like my ex, will make it work for them even though it will never work for their family. |
Anonymous
| Do you have much smaller house now? Do you still have help? Did you lose your circle of friends after divorce? |
Anonymous
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What job did you have, either prekids or when you went back part time?
What does your new husband do? How did you meet current husband? |
Anonymous
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How old were your kids when you divorced?
Did they feel sad, hurt, act out bc dad never engaged or was present when he was home bc he paid more attention to checking emails than to them? |
Anonymous
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You sound like a really thoughtful, lovely person.
Also, for what it's worth, I want to validate you and say--there are people who are crappy at work life balance (like me). And then there are people who go on an international, ten day work trip after the birth of their first child. Holy shit. |
Anonymous
My house is smaller now, but plenty big enough. My ex said he would vote with his feet. If I wanted to leave, I could leave, but he was going to stay in our house, so that it would always feel like home to the kids when they came to see him. I thought that made a lot of sense on both fronts. I was able to buy a somewhat smaller house with proceeds from the splitting of the marital assets and child support payments. When the child support ended, I needed to downsize again, but it is still a decent-sized house. And I still stayed within a mile of the old house even though the kids were grown and it didn't really matter any more. Do I still have help?? Did I mention that I ever had help? After the split, I never had a cleaning service again, and I'm not the best housekeeper, so that's been a bit of a problem but it's something I just need to work on. The kids were in school when we split and I worked part-time, so we did not need much after school help. Some relatives in the area helped as needed after school at first. I did lose the circle of big law friends. Only one big law spouse friend called and got together after we split. We just got together that one time and that was it. I think it must have been a bit awkward for the big law friends and their spouses, since the big law partners were going to continue to work together and maybe they felt funny being friends with both of us. But honestly, I wasn't independent friends with most of them, just through my ex, so it's not surprising that they did not pursue an independent friendship with me. I still have a very close circle of my own friends predating my marriage, so I didn't miss the big law friends. But it did surprise me that more of them did not reach out to see how I was doing. But I did not contact them either. I think it was a mutual feeling that it would just be easier and cleaner to go our separate ways. |